4 Aug 2002 (updated 4 Aug 2002 at 01:17 UTC)
»
bah, galeon crashed while I was writing this.
GPE
I've been doing a fair amount of GPE work to get things ready for the 0.6 Familiar release. As well as checking my own packages for bugs, I've been doing some general tidying up. For example, I patched gpe-bootsplash to be able to display the splash screen upside-down - the H3800 series iPAQs have their screens wired up that way, for some reason - and I applied the patch I'd previously posted to bugzilla so that the gpe-login package now provides a confirmation dialog when you ask to log out, rather than just immediately killing off your session.
GPE hacking has happily become rather less hassle recently - while I was down in London I picked up a PCMCIA sleeve for my iPAQ, so I can now plug in one of my wireless network cards. Before that I had been using usbnet (which would decide to die after too much was transferred) or PPP-over-serial (which is just too slow).
I've also acquired a Stowaway keyboard, so I'll have to put together a little GPE program to control that at some point.
Dissertation
This weekend I finally got around to implementing an Hidden Markov Model system for my project - the bit that's important here uses the Viterbi algorithm to find the globally-most-likely state sequence (rather than just the most likely outcome at each time step).
For those who don't know, my project's about getting the computer to learn to harmonise music, by feeding in a training set of harmonisations (I'm using Bach chorales as my test data). What I'm doing with the HMM is treating harmonies as an underlying sequence of states, which are emitting a melody note at each time step. After building a model from training data, the program can reconstruct a hidden state sequence for a new melody, and use this to fill in the other voices.
EdLUG
It was my birthday last week, but seeing as it was the first Thursday of the month I was at the Edinburgh Linux Users Group as usual - though that was at least partly a pragmatic decision, since EdLUG would have depleted any other event I'd tried to schedule for the same time, especially since it was meeting outside the city centre, in Leith, to avoid the Festival crowds.
I finally got round to doing the whole GPG keysigning thing, which Dougie seemed disproportionally amused about.